Parents as Teachers Magazine Blog

Sploochie and The Big Ragoo

At some point, little kids begin to recognize that Mommy and Daddy have more than one name. That point for C actually came several months ago — if you asked her what Daddy’s name was, she would readily reply “Brian” — but sometime about a couple of weeks ago it got stuck in her head, and ever since then it has been stuck in ours. Every utterance the child has made for the past week has been prefixed with “Brian” (or, more phonetically, “Bwiiiiann”) at varying levels of volume. Sometimes it’s just like a mantra for her: bwianbwianbwianbwianbwianbwian, over and over again until she gets tired of saying it (which so far is apparently never).

Phone rings.
Daughter: [answering phone, doesn't even say Hello] “I am 4 because I am G. My dad is the strongest man in the world.”

Person on phone: “Bzzbzzz bzz zz.”

Daughter: “And he has the most beautiful neckties in the world.”

Later on, she had to go to the toilet. She did this long Judy Garland thing on the way there, and in the bathroom itself, belting out this song about how great I am, with her arms spread out wide, observing herself in her reflection and correcting her pose and facial expressions: “My dad is the most handsome! And the strongest! And la la la!”

Neanderthal: (driving along) “You-make-me-feel—so-emotional…”

Homo sapiens sapiens: (Vocally rolling eyes) “Dad, you’re singing.”

Neanderthal: “Huh? Singing? Doh, me no sing.”

Homo sapiens sapiens: “I’m trying to hear my CD.”

Neanderthal: (Grabbing CD box from daughter, who has been studying liner notes with the intensity of a biblical scholar with a new Dead Sea scroll fragment) “What her name, anyway? How spell? Christina-Aguilera. Mmm.”

Homo sapiens sapiens: (Retrieving CD cover) “You’re going to write about this on your website, aren’t you? On your ‘blog’.”

Neanderthal: “Whoa d00d, no way. Me not joke about you on blog. You have low opinion of dad, whoa. Me not believe this.”

Homo sapiens sapiens: “And you’re wearing dorky sunglasses.”

At the dinner table yesterday, it struck me how grown-up Beta suddenly looks. She’ll be 13 in the summer, and is getting tall and slender, with a woman looking out of her eyes at times, like a ghost of the future. She is beautiful.

She plays harp so well it makes people cry. She got perfect grades in school this semester. And like an anchor holding her down to earth amidst all this perfection, she has her little sister Gamma.

They put on a performance yesterday that sort of gave us an idea how their relationship would be for the next 20 years:

Was working on the children’s Halloween party and I told Alpha as a joke, “if I ever get fired, I could always get a job designing S&M chambers.”

I was decorating our cellar for Beta’s Halloween party. Beta is our oldest daughter. She’s now 13.

“What’s an S&M chamber?” asked Beta, with a look on her face saying that she already knew. This Internet generation.

The walls and floor are covered in black plastic, and spiderwebs and black plastic streamers hang from the ceiling, and a red bulb has replaced the white one in the ceiling lamp ready for the Halloween Party. So the room, which will be the Halloween disco, now resembles a really dirty darkroom.